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Well, That Was Quick

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

My love affair with Jekyll appears to have come to an abrupt end. While it was working acceptably, Liquid Templates are, for the most part, totally unbearable. I understand their purpose but for a single developer who is comfortable with Ruby it was just one more layer of abstraction. Writing tags for it is doable, but it’s often more complex than just putting a little bit of Ruby inline via ERB.

Jekyll works well. I’m not knocking it. I also know you can switch out the rendering engine, but my attempts were more work than they were worth. I probably would have stuck with it anyway except I discovered a similar project called nanoc which a number of people had mentioned in Jekyll-related conversations. It’s definitely more in the mold of what I was looking for.

In a nutshell, the way nanoc’s Rules file works is awesome. I built my own filter stacking system similar to what part of Rails asset pipeline does (e.g. I can name a file script.js.coffee.erb and it will be filtered through ERB and then Coffee Script). nanoc ended up appealing to the control freak in me, although I probably should have worked on non-mobile layout today. Oh well.